How well I remember tuning into The Phil Donahue Show one wintry morning in 1973 when Phil's guest was Paul Erhlich. According to the Stanford professor, because of 'overpopulation', the world was about to undergo such widespread famine that hundreds of millions would starve to death by 1985. And Phil believed him.

The book sold three million copies. Never mind that the predictions of global catastrophe in his influential book The Population Bomb never came true or that the African famines of the 1970s and 1980s were the result, not of overpopulation, but of Marxist governments. Has Erhlich admitted his errors? Of course not. In his 1989 sequel The Population Explosion, he simply moved on, ignoring his past mistakes and moving them further into the future.

Nor, like fellow doomsayers from Malthus to Ralph Nader, is Erhlich likely to pay any attention whatsoever to reports that discredit his views. Take the latest United Nations report which forecasts that average fertility rates around the world will decline to western levels by 2050, if not sooner. According to the latest findings, women in all countries will be bearing only 1.85 children by mid-century. With women in developing countries now limiting their offspring as much as those in the West, it seems 'family planning' projects around the globe have been successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams.

"All the evidence suggests fertility is falling rapidly in developing countries with no sign it is going to stop at the magical number of two," declares Larry Heligman of the UN population division. In Thailand, where in the 1970s women were averaging five children, they are now averaging under two. Worldwide, women currently bear 2.7 children, but figures for the West are much lower. Here in Britain, the fertility rate is 1.61; in Italy, the figure stands at 1.2; in Spain, 1.3 and in Russia 1.14.

But the real surprise has been the trend towards Western birth rates in previously exploding populations such as Iran where, at the height of the Khomeini revolution in the early 1980s women bore an average 6.5 children. Today, the UN claims that, in a mere two decades, family planning (read birth control and abortion) has brought that number down to just 2.75. Similar downward trends can also be seen in India, Indonesia, Tunisia and Brazil.

What this means is that Malthusian predictions are not materialising. In fact, by 2075, the earth's population may have shrunk by half a billion, Heligman said.

So much for Ehrlich's apocalyptic warnings, though anyone with half a brain and half an ounce of Christian faith would have seen his forecasts for what they were--not truth but an all-out attack on the family and on humanity itself. Talk about emissaries of Beelzubub! It's been a homicidal thirty years, fuelled by a potent cocktail of relentless fear-mongering, sexual pressure and moral fatuity.

Indeed, if one were a conspiracy theorist, one might make connections between Erhlich's po-faced claims and the Roe v Wade decision of 1973 which, under the guise of a right to privacy, ushered in unimagined and unprecedented carnage. Since that decision, roughly 40 million preborn American children have been murdered. Forty million. Eighty million hands. Most helpful, some not. But that's not the point. The dead were all children of God, made not accidentally nor haphazardly but fearfully and wonderfully. Each had an appointed purpose to fulfill and a right to fulfill it, now lost forever.

And like the Erhlich-style terrorism that worked to prevent even the conception of God-knows how many people, this particular holocaust began with a huge lie that supposes that we the people, not God, are the authors of our own lives and that we, not God, know best our true needs, not just as individuals but as nations. Yet millions remain in denial.

"We're not in the same situation as in the 1970s," harrumphed Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau who, when apprised of the UN's latest figures, accused the world body of jumping the gun. "If fertility declines to only 2.5 by the mid-century, we'll have a population of 27 billion in 100 years. The world may not be able to support that number of people."

A more likely worry is that most countries will soon be finding it increasingly difficult to support the elderly, says Jacqueline Kasun, author of Too Many People? "Already Europe is worried by a population crunch that will leave it with a high-spending welfare state but few earners to support it," she says. When I was a child, my parents told me about 'Providence', the belief that the Lord God created each and every one of us and provides for our every need. Recently, I attended a family reunion, one of the greatest experiences of my whole life. There, assembled in a huge room, were mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles and countless cousins. My family. By the grace of God, each of us had been born into this family and nothing and no one could have prevented a single one of us from attending that party.

As I stood there in a state of delight impossible in a gathering of mere friends-- one in a family of nearly one hundred-- I felt Providence firsthand and felt how crucial the words 'be fruitful and multiply' are to its ongoing flow. >Paula Adamick writes from London, England, where she pubishes the monthly expatriate paper, the Canada Post.